Fill up for a punchier picture

ONE of the classic problems in photography is taking a good picture of someone with the Sun behind them. Part of the problem is that light bounces around inside the camera, making the picture lack contrast. Now an American physicist has found a way of capturing the sceneby filling a digital camera with oil.

In a normal digital camera, there is a space between the lens and the chips known as charge-coupled devices (CCD) which sense and record pictures. That space is filled with air. As light leaves the lens and crosses the space, the change in refractive index makes it scatter and bounce around inside the camera, so it hits the imaging sensor several times. The human eye does not have these problems. "So I copied the design of the human eye, which uses liquid to fill the gap between lens and retina," says Edward Kelley, a physicist at ...

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